King Croesus

This blog is about the KCCD2009 (King Croesus Contempt for Death) Trip and it's preparations. The journey will be performed on 2x 1939 Nimbus motorcycles with sidecars and ETD is April 2009. ETA is unknown, as you never know if it's a Sweet Chariot or an Infernal Machine you ride.

Sunday, 16 November 2008

Nimbus in Nirvana

OBS: NORSK UTGAVE FØLGER UNDEROn a Sunday recently the doorbell rang, someone asking for contributions for Blue Cross. We said we’d contribute, but would need 15 minutes to pack our gear. Turned out they wanted money rather than patients, so we had to say no. We needed the cash later in the day to buy alcohol, in order to get absolutely plastered to block out ourselves and the cruel world around us, on the ferry trip to Copenhagen.

This was also was the day we were going to John Carlsen Nimbus in Copenhagen and get ourselves some four-speed gearboxes, instead of the sorry old ones with only three speeds. Actually we had planned to ride down (translators note; yeah, right), but due to some unpleasant noises in the ’box of The Infernal Machine we opted for the ferry, as we were going to change that part anyway. It all went as expected, and for my part it was almost a replay of of the ferry trip from Stockholm to Riga during KCCD2006. Luckily we made it to John’s workshop before I was awake enough to really notice the after-effects of the unruly seas.

We got to work right away, tearing out the gearboxes so the parts flew about like coming from an IED. After that John tore the boxes further apart, teeth of the sprockets as well as those of the customers flying about the workshop, richochetting off the walls. Then he pressed in the new four-speed gear clusters, and lo and behold, our gear tally had improved by 33,3 %. Between the two bikes we now had eight speeds, as opposed to the previous six.

Throughout Tuesday the ’boxes were back in their proper place, and we took care of all the necessary minor adjustments and did some small fixes that we had forgotten while restoring the bikes.

Now we had gotten the bikes into the mechanical equivalent of Nirvana, and during all that a bunch of Nimbus friends had shown up while we were here. Danes sure are much more friendly and easygoing than the Norwegians.

Bye-byes to our friend & host Kim Scholer a.k.a. Schim Cooler taken care of, we left Copenhagen Thursday at 10 am. Got out of Copenhagen easily, and had a nice if progressively colder trip to Gothenburg. From there onwards it pissed down, and by the time we reached home in Holmestrand at 11 pm we had grown gills. Klaus smelled like a wet dog, and we both agreed that it had been a great trip.

Mucho thanks to our host Kim, Nimbus Guru John for helping us fix the bikes, and to everyone who dropped by to cheer us on.